Mobilize your workforce for quick and easy file server remote access, web browser-based access, and mobile access without a VPN.
An electric construction company used a traditional VPN for its field engineers, while most office workers use a local corporate network to access file servers. After the pandemics, many office workers also switch to remote work-from-home arrangements. Close to mid-2020, the concurrent active VPN connections on the company Fortinet firewall are tripled. Remote employees experienced dropped connections, and they need to resolve the slow VPN with dropped connection problem.
An engineering firm has four offices in Texas. The main office is in Dallas, with over 50% of the employees work from the Dallas office while employees from the other offices access the file servers via site-to-site VPN to the main Dallas office. There is a mesh-like SD-WAN network among the four offices, so logically all four offices are like an extensive local area network. After the pandemics started in 2020, most of the employees are working from home, so when the Dallas office is down (such as losing power to the building), all four offices are down without file server access, and it is a classic single point of failure. They plan to lift and shift the Dallas file servers to Azure's south-central data center in San Antonio to mitigate the single point of failure. The Azure data center has better Internet bandwidth and power supply. But the problem is that employees working from home still need to use existing corporate VPN to connect to the file servers and thus single-point-of-failure again. They would welcome a solution that provides a better VPN-less solution for remote file server access directly from Azure.
The on-premise NetApp contract will expire, and the CIO doesn't want to renew it anymore because the corporate VPN on the Fortinet Firewall was saturated for remote workers. He hired a local IT consultant to help him move to the Cloud. The only requirement is not to repeat the same NetApp contract for the years to come but replace it with something new, something modern, and something in the Cloud. The IT consultant lift-and-shift the NetApp SMB workload into a regional data center and front the SMB interface with a Triofox solution. The CIO gets a solution that is backward compatible with on-premise workload and at the same time receives a SharePoint-like user interface with a browser interface, mobile applications, and remote Windows and Mac file server access without the need for a VPN.
VPN is not an ideal solution for a lot of remote workers
How many times has your support team been overwhelmed by VPN tickets? For most non-technical people, VPN is too complicated:
Without a solution, employees may often select an unauthorized third-party solution to facilitate productivity and efficiency. However, copying company documents and files onto personal storage drives creates problems with data sprawling and compliance.
A traditional VPN requires a stable and active connection to the corporate Firewall to work. A glitch on the Internet or a dropped connection on the Firewall will disrupt an employees' work with unsaved files. Offline editing allows remote workers to save and edit documents without an active link and save the files back to a corporate file server asynchronously when the connection is happening again.
A firewall vendor usually provides VPN without an Always-on feature. Always-on VPN requires more infrastructure components such as identity server, authentication server, compatible client OS, etc. However, most modern cloud applications are always on, enabling offline access to files and folders and allowing files to be saved on a local device before synchronizing it with the online servers.
File server access is hardly high performance because when a VPN enables it, the file accessing communicates via SMB/CIFS protocol. First of all, the SMB protocol is not a data-streaming protocol with many requests and responses. If we can switch to HTTP-streaming for file transfer, the performance will improve. Secondly, HTTP-based file transferring enables the traffic to take advantage of a global content delivery network, so HTTP is faster for cross-continent delivery.
This white paper describes Gladinet Triofox, which businesses can use to quickly enable secure remote access and mobile access to file servers without using a VPN and without synchronizing to external storage services such as Office 365, Dropbox, or Box.
With more and more businesses practicing the CDC's social distancing guidelines during a global pandemic, there is increased interest in faster ways to facilitate work from home without compromising data privacy, security, or compliance.
Virtual Private Network (VPN) has been the default method of remote file access. However, VPN has many problems. Employees have been looking for a solution that can combine the security of a file server and the ease of use of a third-party application like Dropbox into one single end-to-end solution.
Triofox empowers traditional file servers with new remote web access, file sharing & mobile application capabilities. It adds cloud mobility features while retaining the old security safeguards, permission controls, and data ownership. The solution also allows you are sharing files and folders with existing permission!
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Triofox is a self-hosted solution that adds secure remote access and file sharing, disaster prevention and recovery, to file servers on-premises with easy cloud migration to private cloud storage. It is the real cloud file server solution you have been looking for to resolve slow VPN issues!
Triofox connects local file servers and the Cloud for secure remote access without using a VPN.
Triofox turns a private cloud storage account into a central cloud file repository with version control, file change history, and audit tracing to provide business continuity for file servers on-premises.
Triofox adds secure mobile file sharing from a web browser or a mobile application.
The solution combines the file server's security protection with web-based mobile accessing methods to increase remote workers' productivity.
Triofox is a web server that accepts file requests from client agents over the HTTPS/SSL protocol. These requests are then translated into Active Directory and File Server network share access protected by NTFS permissions. The file is sent back via HTTPS/SSL to the client agents when all permission checks have passed. Triofox uses this approach to combine the power of a mapped drive with the simplicity of web browsing and the security of a file server!
Triofox creates a web server front end accepting client agent requests from remote Windows, Mac, web browser, iOS and Android devices. Client agents provide drive mapping functionality.
Client agents send HTTPS/SSL requests to the Triofox server. Triofox server can log the requests for auditing purpose and also coordinate the file access and sharing demands.
Active Directory and NTFS permissions are used to check whether the file requests are allowed. After that, file requests are satisfied and returned via HTTPS/SSL to client agents.
Simple always-on drive letter mapped to your on-premise file server without glitch.
Reduces costs with VPN (virtual private network) support.
Combines Windows file server security and control with the cloud's ease of use and productivity.
Has a simpler permission migration and configuration strategy than SharePoint, Dropbox or Google Drive - inherit it directly from file server.
Combines NTFS permissions, Active Directory users and drive mappings with remote access from any device.
Maintains data privacy by providing the option keep data on-premises in traditional file server shares.
Triofox eliminates the common drawbacks of traditional file server access and cloud file sharing solutions and combines both strengths with the following benefits.
Businesses can address data privacy concerns by using Triofox to provide access to internal file servers. It’s common to talk about replacing existing file servers with cloud solutions to reduce costs and administrative overhead, and Triofox can facilitate that in any private cloud, but Triofox offers the unique option of using existing file servers data storage to facilitate cloud file sharing!
Simplify corporate file sharing with familiar interfaces on any computer or device. Windows and Mac desktops display natively mapped drives in Explorer and Finder. That same experience is presented on iOS and Android devices like iPads, iPhones and Pixels or can be viewed from popular web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Internet Explorer.
Easily collaborate with business partners by providing them with access to a limited set of internal files or folders. Share files with non-AD users while maintaining administrative controls. Simplify multi-site collaboration with automatic version controls and file locking.
Eliminate the overhead and support tickets commonly associated with VPN file sharing, Always On VPN or Direct Access. Automatically use existing users and permissions to save setup time and money.
Centrally manage users, access controls, and storage for each tenant. Easily keep track of where the data is, who has access and how it’s being shared.
For complete control and visibility, permissions can be managed from the file server that was their source. NTFS permissions associated with private data storage will be inherited to continue the protection.
Centrally manage users, access controls, and storage for each tenant. Administrators can perform audits of GDPR and HIPAA compliance or keep track of any changes that have been made to individual files.
Provide an always-on mapped drive that works anywhere on any device and allows mobile users to easily access internal file shares or cloud file servers.
Files are secured at rest and in transit with military grade encryption, secure connections and more. Automatically use existing users and permissions to save setup time and money.
Mapped drives display directory structure but delay downloads until a file is used to reduce bandwidth usage and endpoint storage consumption.
From file server storage, to internal Active Directory IT infrastructure and the firewalls protecting access to internal digital assets, enterprise can create a completely private file sharing solution.
Triofox has the flexibility to provide an on-premises alternative to Dropbox and SharePoint using existing file servers.
Ready to boost mobile productivity and enable workforce to work from home today?
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